The Third Word from the Cross
Here is your son….here is your mother John 19:26,27
One of the most powerful of medieval hymns ever written is ‘Stabat mater dolorosa’. It has been set to music by many wonderful composers and its title means, quite simply, ‘The sorrowful mother stood’. That is what faithful mothers do. They stand by through thick and thin, even when they don’t understand what is happening. That was true of Mary. We cannot imagine the grief and pain she was suffering at this moment, as she watched the life of her beloved Son come to a tragic end – a life for which she had had so much hope.
Of course, that ‘end’ had already been prophesied on the fortieth day after Jesus’ birth, when she took him to be presented in the Temple. Ancient Simeon had spoken to her and said, ‘Mary…this child is appointed for the rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also)….’.
The words of Jesus to his mother Mary which are recorded in the Gospels are not always gentle ones. At 12 years of age, when his parents lost Jesus at the Temple, his mother said to him, ‘Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been searching for you in great distress.’ Jesus famously replied, ‘Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’ Or, at Cana in Galilee, Mary comes to him panicking that the wine has run out, and again gets a rather curt response: ‘Woman, what does that have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.’
But here, on the cross, Jesus’ care and love for his mother is supremely evident. It is as though he wants to provide for her before his life runs out. He entrusts her to John, the beloved disciple, and he also entrusts John, the beloved disciple to her ‘motherhood’. And we are told immediately in John’s Gospel, ‘And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home.’
There is another interesting angle on this third word from the cross, ‘Here is your son….here is your mother’. It is this: Jesus on the cross is creating a totally new kind of family, a totally new community. He could, after all, have entrusted his mother to her sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, who was standing right beside her at that moment. Or he could have entrusted her to one of her other children. But he didn’t. He was, even on the cross, creating a new kind of community, held together as a spiritual family – a community which exists through faith in him and his cross. In actual fact, the church is being born at this point, not (as is so often said) on the day of Pentecost. We who look to Christ and are spiritually born again belong to that family of care and love which he initiates in his third ‘word’.